


The Cave

by Awal



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 16:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2474183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Awal/pseuds/Awal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is the most difficult person she’s ever had to rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cave

**Author's Note:**

> My undying gratitude to LanaLucy who did an extremely great last minute beta for not one but two of my stories for IWRY 2014. Any mistakes left over are all mine.

_“I found him.”_

_“Where?”_

_“Encased in stone.”_

Buffy wonders how exactly it is that Angel ended up here - in this deep hollow space, hidden in plain view, colored only in midnight blue and the darkest shades of gray.

She can barely see him - even up close he is almost a shadow - but she can feel his eyes, and goosebumps prickle her skin, force her to be more conscious than cautious.

She drops to her knees in front of him, kneeling at the altar, only she’s meant to be his salvation.

The lighter grays wrap around the wetness in his gaze and liquid glitter rolls off the shadows in the dark. 

She presses her lips against his, rocks forward in an arc, spurred on by intense relief.

He pushes past her teeth, swipes his tongue at the candied texture of her mouth, and her stomach bottoms out. His hands fold around her shoulders, haul her body closer with a solid jerk that makes her knees skid on the slick gummy ground. 

His hands are everywhere, painting her flesh with fingerprint bruises, nipping at her lips hard enough to bring wetness to her eyes. He frantically rips at her clothes, manages to shred her shirt and mould his palm to her chest, to feel the vibrations of her erratic heartbeat.

When their lips finally separate she’s lightheaded, can barely catch her breath. She gasps, manages to control her irregular panting, to force her breathing to a silent backdrop as she cups his face gently, wipes at his tears with her fingertips, “It’s really me.” She whispers.

“Buffy?”

She doesn’t have time to voice her confirmation because he’s kissing her again, much gentler, less of a claiming and more of a soft exploring, but the result is the same and she loses her breath all over again.

“Angel,” she pants.

“How did?-- are?” He takes a deep breath. 

She can hear him shift as he takes blind inventory. “I’m fine,” she assures him. Her clothes are splattered with demon blood, her skin is damp, her ears overwhelmed by the roaring of rushing water but she is unharmed.

“Can you stand?”

“Buffy,” he says sadly.

She still can’t see him in the dark, not really. Can’t assess his injuries if he won’t vocalize them.

“How bad are you hurt?” She asks.

When he doesn’t respond her hands find his head and she starts tracing gentle fingers over his stubbled face, through long wet hair and over his scalp, “Are you hurt?” Her hands roll over his shoulders, over his chest, his stomach, she can feel gashes, soft, newly healed with what she knows is silvery pink skin, but there’s nothing that would impair movement. His breathing is silent, no internal bleeding or broken ribs. 

“Angel, please.”

Soft cool fingers lift her hand from his stomach and slowly inch down. Her stomach does that little fluttery thing all on its own but he keeps pace, slowly inching all the way down to his leg. Singular. 

A deep horrified gasp rips past her throat as she scrambles to get closer, to focus on the slight shadow, to run her fingers along the ground where his right leg should be. The stump starts at his thigh, wet jagged flesh, torn muscles, shards of bone. His right limb is suspended inches to the side of where it should be, detached, hanging by what feels like only the knotted cloth of his tattered pants.

Tears splash hot on her face, and she can’t bring herself to even ask what happened. She just knows it must be fixed. 

She doesn’t know anything about the limitations of vampire healing. If she can somehow wrap the severed portion to the stump will the flesh knit around it? Will it regenerate on its own? Will blood help? Will magic?

“Shhh.” His cool fingers wipe the tears from her cheek, but it’s redundant; before his fingers finish their swipe, new tears take their place. 

She stands, roughly grabbing the ends of her torn shirt and tying them together before widening her stance in preparation to bear his weight. 

“Let’s get out of here.”

†

He is heavier than she’s ever felt, the closest to dead weight he’s ever been. Its awkward as she takes small steps, pulling the right side of his body forward with her. He hops on his left leg precariously and Buffy unintentionally flashes back to Giles lecturing her about her footwear, something about her toes being imperative to her balance.

They traverse miles but Buffy knows Angel cannot make it back the entire way like this. It takes too much energy for him to leap each step and there’s nothing around to help, no way to utilize his upper body strength. Not when the walls are jagged rocks, too sharp to get purchase on without being injured even further.

Her tears don’t stop their silent flow until she is terrified. Not for herself of course, but for him. Slayer strength would allow her to continue on at this rate for an indeterminate number of miles, but when his strength is tapped and she has to carry him completely she will tire quickly and be unable to protect him from whatever invisible threats lie ahead.

Her enhanced senses can track insects sliding along the dark corridors, too many legs scurrying against the rocks, but she has yet to hear, to smell, to feel, anything that could lend Angel sustenance. She may very well have to feed him herself.

“I’m fine.” he says, as if reading her train of thought. 

“Do you know when you fed last?” 

His swallow is dry, “No.” 

He’s lying. Which means he’s hungry, probably starving. Buffy’s frustrated she can’t find the truth with her eyes. Even their shadows have been swallowed by the blackness.

They limp through high, narrow, straight passages that persist in widespread loops. When Buffy smells the rocks change into what she knows is smooth slimy stone, she cuts their steps in half. 

“Just ahead there’s a drop,” she warns him. 

She’d had to scale the vertical shaft with bare hands. “It’s five miles or so, but the rock isn’t sharp.” If she’d paid attention to whatever class taught her about geology -- that’s the one with rocks right? -- she’s sure it would come in handy right now. 

They step over bodies - demons she killed on her way to him, demons she will never be able to identify. A knife through the heart or severing of the spine through beheading has killed everything she’s come across so far. 

Angel’s painful grunts have increased, his habitual breathing has stopped completely, and she can feel his cool skin drenched in sweat. 

“Let’s rest for a minute,” she says. 

He doesn’t wait a beat before saying, “No.” 

Buffy bites her lip against calling him out on his macho bullshit. He is the most difficult person she’s ever had to rescue. Just when she’s going to say something she can’t take back, her toes fold off the edge of the shaft. “Stop,” she says harshly. One more hop and Angel will fall uncontrollably. “This is the shaft.” 

On the climb up her backpack had dropped unceremoniously, losing the food, the water, the flashlight, bandages, rope… everything that would have came in handy through the hours of wandering dark caverns. 

“How--” How do you implement a controlled fall, she wants to ask. How does she insure he lands without completely severing what is left of his mangled leg.

“We don’t have a choice,” he says. “You go first. I’ll be right behind you.” 

He can’t see the lines of her face twist miserably. She just got him back and she doesn’t want to lose him again. She won’t. She wishes again for the rope in her backpack to anchor them together. 

“It’s a straight shot,” she explains, “a little rocky for the first couple of feet, so we’ll have to drop straight down. But after that the rock is slick so we can slide down. There’s a forty foot drop at the bottom-- but we’ll do it together.”

He shifts in her grasp and she can feel the heat of his gaze even if she can’t see it. “Ready?”

He pushes off the ground forcefully, pulling her along. In the air over the hole he wraps her around his body and they fall. 

She pushes her face into his neck, feels the chill of his chest against hers, and the air from their descent flutters her clothes. She is damp, and her teeth chatter on their own, even as her body radiates a supernatural heat.

†

The fall is quick, frustratingly so after she’d had to scale her way up, but when the ground closes in on them Angel shifts so his body takes the impact. She is knocked out of his arms and rolls, breathless but uninjured.

Immediately she bounds to her feet and runs to him, “Angel?” 

She finds his body splayed out, hard and unmoving. She comforts herself with the fact that he is not dust. Not dead. Or any more dead than he’s always been to her. 

But he is unconscious. 

She feels new wounds along his body, deep gashes, several broken ribs, and his leg… It’s completely severed, fresh blood spattered on the hard stone beneath his body. 

“Shit!”

Immediately she begins her blind search for her backpack. Slowly, like a childhood game, she crawls, eyes wide open and unseeing, her hands feeling for the man-made material. 

When her hands clasp around the rough fabric, she is so relieved she is tempted to say a prayer.

It takes only a moment to find the flashlight broken into several pieces, yet still secured in the netting on the outside of the bag.

Some of her gratitude dissipates.

There’s still a baggie with a few long matches and she rips it open and lights one, using its small illumination to search the rest of her bag. As cold as she is, she pulls out her small sweater and lights it on fire, tossing it onto the dry patch of ground she’d crawled over.

The flame flickers hotly and paves the way back to Angel’s body. 

She can see his greying skin color, the ebbed flow of rich crimson that matches the rust flavor in her mouth. 

She grips his upper arm with both hands, feeling for the socket and joint. Holding his arm securely she jerks. It pops into place and her eyes dart to his face. 

He remains expressionless, unmoving.

The flickering light of the fire is slowly being swallowed by the darkness. She hurries to grab a bottle of water and the rope from her backpack, feeling for anything hard to help hold his leg straight. 

What she wouldn’t give for a tree branch. Ooh. She rips open the back pocket of the bag, tearing the zipper off in her haste, and grips her stake. 

She makes a mental note--later when he’s healed and they’re safe, they’ll laugh about irony.

She peels away the tatters of cloth matted to his leg and pulls the severed pieces of his thigh together, lining up the fragments of bone and flesh. 

Her stake she pushes at the back of his knee, immobilizing the movement of the joint, and she ties the rope to itself, crosshatching it securely around his leg, thigh, and the stake. When the six foot rope comes to its end, she triple-ties it and sits back on her haunches to scrutinize it with the remaining light from the fire. 

She traces the planes of his face. Marvels that even trapped in a mountain cave he still manages to look beautiful. She says his name a few times, slides his head onto the softness of her thigh and strokes his hair, finally allowing herself a moment to breathe. 

She takes a sip of water. Forces down one of those nasty Fiber One bars Dawn is always eating. She is refreshed, and that only reminds her that he needs to feed. Soon.

Even if he manages to make a quick recovery into consciousness, he will need blood to saturate his muscles and give him the strength to continue. To speed up his reepithelialization.

She plays back her survival training, silently thanking Giles. He is so getting a present when they make it out of this cave. 

She remembers she doesn’t have to worry about bacteria with Angel, and then she has to second-guess herself - she didn’t need to cauterize the wound, right? 

She has to leave him so she drags him carefully from beneath the shaft and leaves him in the blackness behind a boulder. 

She searches for two miles in every direction, honed on every smell, every sound. The only thing she manages to find is a wall of bats, and she knows nothing about them. Would their blood work, would it somehow be poisonous, or rancid? 

She makes the journey back to him quickly, her body swiftly maneuvering around rocks as if she could see. 

Even if her depth perception wasn’t perfect with memories of the walked path, she could find him. The pull from her belly would lead her directly to his side.

†

This time when she lays his head on one of her thighs, she wraps the other around his torso, mindful of his ribs. _Just in case_ she tells herself. The only other time she’d done this she had awakened in a hospital, nauseous and pale. 

She pulls her knife from the waistband of her pants and slices open her wrist with one fluid movement. The scent of her blood envelops her before she even feels the sting of the blade.

His face shifts. 

It barely takes the pressure from her fingertips and his slack mouth is open, a warm river flowing over her skin and dripping into his mouth, puddling over his tongue and down his throat. 

Angel swallows, his body slowly coming to life. 

Twin razors slide into her flesh and she can hear the skin on her wrist break, then there’s the cold wet pressure of his mouth, suckling.

There’s a string to her heart - an artery, she realizes - running the length of her wrist, her arm, connecting to her heart. With every pull she can feel it intimately, like plucking a taut wire on a guitar. The pain-pleasure of it causes her to make music.

Her heartbeat is loud, buzzing over her skin, drumming with a vibration that seems to echo in the cavern. 

She can’t tell their moans apart. Can’t catch her breath, even as she throws her head back -- gasping, moaning, thrashing on him, beneath him. 

His growls turn to a soft purr, and the suckling is replaced by his tongue, lapping, soothing. 

“I’m sorry,” he says as soon as he pulls his mouth away, his large hand wrapped around her wound, applying pressure. 

“I’m okay.” But she’s not. Her body is trembling, her heart galloping, she’s lightheaded, painfully aroused, mortally terrified, and it’s -- exhilarating. 

He untangles himself from her body and painfully pulls himself up to lean next to her on the boulder. 

“I couldn’t find anything,” she tells him by way of explanation. 

When she’s met with silence she continues, “Bats-- but ew what have they been feeding on in here?”

“I know,” he interrupts her harshly. “It’s okay.”

It doesn't sound like it’s okay. 

“Angel?” 

“I’m healing,” he tells her with a painful gasp. “Healing this fast -- hurts.” 

“Oh.” oh.

Her stomach dips into her throat when she realizes she can hear his ribs knitting together, muscles and tendons roping around fractures and tears. 

She guzzles the rest of her water, forcing the vomit down. 

She wasn’t privy to this part last time. 

His body is shaking in silent agony. She can hear his hand biting into rock, kernels of sand dusting the floor. 

She wants to hold him, but he strategically maneuvered his body away from her. She can feel the air between them like a physical barrier, so she closes her eyes and waits. 

When she wakes up she can hear him breathing. A slow inhale-exhale that allows her to release the tension she didn’t know she was holding. 

She doesn’t ask for permission when she reaches for him, her hands following the same path they took only hours before. 

His head wound is nonexistent, the planes of his face impeccable, His shoulder and arm are healed, his ribs -- he inhales sharply -- healed but sore. His fingers close around hers when she reaches for his leg. 

“It’s better -- but it will take time.”

“Had I known --” 

“I know,” he says sadly.

Had she known slayer blood was this powerful she would have freely offered him her life force. 

Its dangerous, stupid even, but if she never has to see him unconscious and mangled again, she’ll do it. 

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Five by five,” she says wryly. 

They both have the same flashback. His fangs in her throat, the weight of his body crushing her into the mansion’s floor, the timber of her voice, the set of her jaw when she simultaneously solidified and changed everything. “Drink. Drink me.”

She can feel her heartbeat pulsing in her throat and her fingers itch to trace the scar there. 

She shivers. “Let’s get out of here before I die of pneumonia.” 

“Hypothermia,” he corrects automatically. 

“That too.”

† 

This time Angel can carry more of his weight and they move more quickly through the horizontal passages, navigating through varying convergences and arcs. 

Water drips over their heads in several passages, the walls are slimy and stink like algae. In others the path is so narrow, Angel has to double over and use his hands to pull his body through. 

Just when fear creeps up Buffy’s spine and she considers the possibility that she missed a turn, that they are lost, the whoosh of water pelting rocks echoes and the salt in the air burns her nose. 

They step over more bodies, piles of bodies Buffy dispatched on her entrance.

“Ready?” She pulls a mini cylinder of oxygen out of her backpack and threads her fingers with his. 

Silently they dive into the water, swim underneath rocky walls, and beneath the air pockets. Buffy pulls a breath of oxygen from the mouthpiece attached to the small tank. Her wrist burns and she flinches thinking of his leg. 

They make it the remaining mile -- or one thousand, three hundred seven meters to be exact -- and the water expands, becomes endless around them. Light penetrates its depth and the moon is reflected several times over. 

Their heads break the water, and Buffy breathes in the outdoors appreciatively. 

Buffy uses their locked hands to wrap his arm around her neck. She kicks her feet hard, pulling him with her toward land. 

† 

A jeep revs up in front of them, the headlights blinding, and the gang hops out.

“I knew you wouldn’t wait for us,” Willows admonishes. 

Giles, Wesley, and Xander rush to them and pull them out of the water. Willow and Anya hang back with blankets in their arms, flashlights roving their bodies, hands full of antiseptic and bandages, a cooler full of pig’s blood.

“How did they get you into a mountain?” Anya asks Angel. “You look very masculine, like you’d be good at sex and fighting.”

WIllow drops the cooler at Angel’s feet and Wesley instructs him to sit so he can examine his leg. 

“Tell the story,” Anya implores impatiently. 

“There’s no story,” Angel says darkly. “Just a pack of Thrapvtyx demons that I owe a visit.”

“Well that’s boring. I’m uninterested again.”

Xander takes Anya’s hand. “That’s my girl.”

Buffy approaches them burrowed inside a thick blanket. Despite the warm air she’s cold from the inside. 

Willow wordlessly hands her an orange juice, and they both pretend there is no significance. 

“You are very seriously injured,” Wesley says needlessly. “This leg may take quite awhile to be fully functional again. We’ll leave it wrapped for the time being.” Wesley meets Buffy’s eyes before he passes her. “Well done.” 

Pride swells at the unexpected compliment. She steps between Angel’s legs, careful of his injured thigh, and presses her face into his throat.

He runs his palm soothingly along her spine. “Are you okay?” 

“Perfect.”

Buffy can feel his throat move several times before he haltingly says, “Thank you.”

“It’s what I do. I’m slay gal. So maybe next time you’re hopelessly outnumbered you’ll give me a call?”

“There is a nest of Thrapvtyx demons that I will be dropping in on if you’re up for it?”

“Oh yeah. Half of those fuckers are mine.” Buffy says vehemently. 

“How about we get you guys back to the hotel and patched up before we plot our revenge?” Willow interjects. 

Buffy remembers feeling for Angel’s leg blindly, the sickening crunch his body made when it made contact with the ground. There’s a knot of rage in her belly. “I’m thinking my sabre will cut them into neat little pieces.”

Angel grunts his approval.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all the participants, for making me look forward to November all year.
> 
> And thank you to Angelus2hot for taking on the responsibility of IWRY.


End file.
